Posts Tagged ‘apps’

While I was writing a comment on Alex Schleber’s post about the iPhone 5 event on Google+ I got a bit carried away and ended up with quite a long comment. Therefore I decided to copy it to my blog. Check the link if you are interested, or join the discussion in Alex’s thread or over here if you like.

My two cents: the iPhone 5 is a cool phone. The glass and aluminum body, the larger screen, faster CPU, longer battery life. All very nice improvements. But my guess is that most 4S users won’t be interested to upgrade to the iPhone 5 except for the fanboys and early-adopters. I am an iPhone 4S user and will definitely skip the iPhone 5 since my two-year contract will expire by the end of next year and the new features are not interesting or major enough for me to justify the upgrade. I’ll wait for the iPhone 6, or 5S, or whatever it will be called. In my logic, iPhone 5 customers will be former iPhone 3GS and 4 owners and the people who got tired of the Android experience when they bought a cheap-ass Android phone about a year ago, running Gingerbread, constantly running out of phone memory. People owning a more recent Android phone with version 3 or 4 of the Android OS probably won’t be interested in an iPhone 5. These Android phones can compete with the iPhone 5 easily on features, screen quality, camera quality, etcetera.

This evening I noticed that the Google+ iPad app was available in the App Store. I downloaded the app immediately and gave it a thorough spin. After playing with it for about 20 minutes I have come to the verdict that it’s underwhelming, at least on user-friendliness. It has quite a number of design flaws in my opinion. Although it looks very slick at first glance, I was longing back to the tablet-optimized Google+ browser version that I have been using on my iPad in the past few weeks.

A number of times I posted links to Android malware news, like this one.

An important lesson in these messages was: don’t download apps from untrusted sources because you risk downloading an app that contains malware.

Every now and then though, the official Android Market gets infected with malware apps. And it happened again recently, where Google had to pull 22 malicious apps from the Market. The post linked below talks about an estimate of 14,000 infected users.

In total, Google took down over a hundred malicious apps already. Since Android phones are very popular with over 500,000 activations a day, I am afraid these malware practices will get worse. I hope I won’t be right and Google invents a mechanism to find and block these apps as soon as they appear.

In the meantime, people should not only be careful when downloading apps from external sources. The Android Market can contain a nasty bug every now and then too.

The lesson to be learned here is in the last sentences of the article:

In a related blog post, Juniper said it discovered a “trove of malicious applications aimed at Android users hosted across different Russia-based third party app stores,” which serves as a reminder to only download Android apps from trusted locations, like Google’s Android Market, Amazon, etc.

For the past few months I have been pondering: will I stick with Android or switch to iPhone? One of the strongest arguments for me to go for a new generation Android phone as the replacement of my (rather crappy) HTC Desire is the dedicated Gmail app. In my opinion this app is the best email experience on a mobile device available today. As a big fan of Gmail, this app is something I simply cannot live without. It has all the important features that the desktop version has: conversation threading, labeling and starring email, email address autocomplete using my Google Contacts, et cetera.

Well, the argument I made above may actually go out of the window. Rumor has it that a dedicated Gmail for iPhone is on the way. This app could be the argument that tips the balance in favor of the iPhone and steer me away from the Android platform.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is another must have iOS music app. It’s universal and is currently priced at $1.99. It was created by Jörg Piringer and it’s hard to describe what it does. In fact in this case I’m not going to attempt a description. Just watch the video above. Awesome.

Until recently, my favorite Twitter client for the iPad was Tweetings for iPad. It’s a great app with many features and lots of hidden options under the surface which you learn know and appreciate as you are working with the app for a longer period of time.

But! A new Twitter app for iPad saw the light of day yesterday: HootSuite for iPad. And it rocks! It looks and feels great. And best of all: it’s free!

Shazam is a very cool app. Just activate the app, keep your phone near a speaker and the app will tell you within a few seconds which song is playing including the album it comes from and links to download the track instantly to your phone.